Ultrasound is used in medicine for both imaging and therapy. However, conventional ultrasound imaging and therapy approaches tend to require different systems for imaging and therapy. This can undesirably lead to increased time in diagnosis and treatment of the patient. Also, a physician may need to use a “best guess” strategy for therapy/stimulation of a particular region because of lack of real-time spatial and anatomical information of the region of interest. Therefore, methods of providing both imaging and therapy with the same system have been considered.
One example is considered in US 2009/0240148. In this work, the system includes both an imaging array and a therapy array integrated to form a composite array. Thus some parts of the array are dedicated to imaging and other parts of the array are dedicated to therapy.
Another example is considered in US 2014/0288428. In this work, the system includes a single transducer array used for both imaging and therapy, and all corresponding electronics is monolithically integrated with the transducer array.